ARhineland Army:Composition and Regional Distribution of Cologne’sContingent to

the Imperial Army of 1532

Markus Jansen

In 1532, the Holy Roman Empire was on the march. Three years after the long, bloody and ultimately successful defence of Vienna in 1529 another large Ottoman army was on its way, led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and trying to finish the tasks left undone.1 To meet this threat, the Imperial Diet in Regensburg called for troops from the Imperial Estates, aso-called ‘eilende Türkenhilfe’ (emergency relief force to help against the Turks). The Imperial Army, which had not always proven to be afast or efficient force, raised about 6,000 horsemen and 30,000 foot-soldiers.2 However, the fortunes of war prevented abig battle, as the Ottoman army was halted at the Hungarian fortress of Kőszeg (then known by its German name Güns). Most of the Ottoman host retreated south, but smaller contingents remained and raided the surrounding countryside. Such agroup of roughly 8,000 men was defeated at Leobersdorf (intoday’sLower Austria)byImperial troops. This remained their only major battle and, with the threat gone, the Imperial army dissolved in October 1532.

One of these contingents sent to the Imperial Army was from Cologne. The Imperial City of Cologne, located on the left bank of the river Rhine in modern Northern Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was one of the biggest cities north of the Alps. After the formal recognition of its status as an Imperial Estate in 1475, its military and financial resources were frequently used by the Habsburg Emperors for their numerous wars.3 Troops from Cologne served for the Empire in Maximilian’ swars in Flanders in 1477, in the war against the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus in 1482, in another campaign in Flanders against Bruges to liberate the imprisoned Maximilian in 1488, in the siege of Arnhem in 1505 and in the campaign against the outlawed knight Franz von Sickingen in 1517. Therefore, the army raised to defend the Empire in 1532 belongs in the contextofthis tradition.

1 Abrief contextualisation of this campaign can be found in:Alfred Kohler, Das Reich im Kampf um die Hegemonie in Europa 1521–1648 (Munich:Oldenbourg, 1990), pp. 13–14.

2 The best in-depth study of an Imperial Army to date has been written by Patrick Leukel, “all welt wil auf sein wider Burgundi”:Das Reichsheer im Neusser Krieg 1474/75 (Paderborn:Schöningh, 2019), who outlines the problems involved in raising an Empirewide army.

One may wonder why this campaign deserves acloser analysis, as the contribution of Cologne to the outcome of the war was minimal,ifnot insignificant. For that very reason, the focus lies not on the activities of the city’ s men in Austria, but on the composition of this army as such. The archives of Cologne keep alittle booklet entitled Monster zedell (inspection paper)that lists all 500 men who took part in the campaign.4 In the document, they are called landtzknecht though we might not necessarily suspect them to be professional or battle-worn soldiers. Their leaders are Andreas von Esslingen, most likely asouth German mercenary, and Johann vom Hirtz, amember of awell-established family of the city’selite. In fact, all the listed men were paid for their service. The employment of paid men to guard the city’swalls and to fight the city’sconflicts is apractice that, in the case of Cologne, goes back to the late 13th century. Yet this does not imply in any way that the city relied on ‘foreign’ troops to keep it safe, but often employed its own citizens as mercenaries. Thus, paid men cannot easily be equated with foreigners, as traditional military history has abundantly done.5

The analysis of the Cologne army of 1532 allows us to highlight this statement, supplemented by the question of which areas did the mercenaries come from. To answer both, an assumption must be made – one that is important to the argument but cannot be ultimately proven. The great majority of the men whose names appear in the Monster zedell are named after places, i. e. they bear so-called toponymical surnames.Examples are Daim van Guylich (ofJülich), Hans van Covelens (ofKoblenz)orHans Arndtz van Norenberch(of Nuremberg). Such names usually imply an origin from a certain city or region, but do not always prove where the person was born. This can be demonstrated by taking aquick look at the elite of Cologne in the examined period, where families such as the von Siegen, von Heimbach or von Stralen can be found. They might have migrated from the places their toponymical surnames refer to and were named after them when arriving in Cologne, but these surnames were passed on to their families. Therefore, in 1532 for example, Arnold von Siegen, several times mayor of Cologne, was native citizen of this city and not of Siegen.

This information is important to the following analysis. However, while not every man with atoponymical surname might originate from the very town in question, there is astrong indication that this still holds true for most of the mercenaries. If we consider the thirty-five men called “from Düren” or the thirty-eight men called “from Cologne” it becomes obvious that we are not dealing with huge families collectively enlistingbut with a group of men from the same place.

4 Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, Best. 50 (Köln und das Reich (K+R), A30.

5 The distinguished military historian Charles Oman, to give one of many possible examples, called the mercenary “astranger to all the nobler incentives to valor, an enemy to his God and his neighbor, the most deservedly hated man in Europe”.Charles W. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages,ed. and rev. by John H. Beeler (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 65–66.

Out of the total of 500 men, 288 could be assigned to 106 (identifiable) places. Their average distance from Cologne is about 90 km, but many of them were located in the Rhineland region close to the city. The majority of places (69 in total)are just mentioned once, twelve are mentioned twice and nine of them three times. This geographical distribution becomes more precise if we extract the seventeen places mentioned the most. Remarkably,all these places are located on the left bank of the river Rhine (see Fig. 6).Together they provided 168 landsknechts, thus only 16 %ofthe places provided 58.33 %ofthe 288 men that could be assigned.Leading amongst them is Cologne itself with thirty-eight men, followed by Düren (42 km from Cologne)with thirty-five men. Next are Linnich (53 km)with fourteen, Jülich (46 km)with thirteen and Nijmegen (135 km)with eight men. Seven mercenaries came from Aachen (71 km)and Euskirchen (35 km), six from Geldern (85 km)and Kempen (66 km), five from Herzogenrath (68 km)and Neuss (37 km), four from Bergheim (25 km), Bonn (28 km), Kerpen (23 km), Sittard (83 km), Wijk bij Duurstede (179 km)and Zons (24 km). Thus, most men came from an average distance of just 58.82 km. More than every tenth originated from Cologne itself. One might argue that all those men without toponymical surnames might also be inhabitants of Cologne and thus there was no need to note their place of origin. Yet this is ahypothesis that can only be proven by an in-depth prosopographic analysis. Besides this strong regional aspect, there is aminority which came from rather distant places such as Trier (155 km), Frankfurt (173 km), Osnabrück (188 km), Delft (243 km), Bruges (288 km)orNuremberg (382 km), but all these cities are mentioned only once.

In conclusion, it appears that the army of 500 Landsknechte the city of Cologne fielded in 1532 was, in large parts, drawn together from the city itself and the surrounding Rhineland with aclear emphasis on the left bank of the river. In this region, the city could rely on its longstanding network spanning the lands between the Rhine and the North Sea. At the same time, even in the age of mercenary,anarmy raised based on paid service could still have strong local ties. To construct aclear opposition between the local militiaman and the foreign mercenary, as Niccolò Machiavelli so famously did in his Il Principe (Cap. XII)isanunsuitable simplification which modern scholarship should avoid.

3) Linnich;4)Jülich;5) Nijmegen;6)Aachen;7)Euskirchen;8)Geldern;9)Kempen;10) Herzogenrath;11) Neuss;12) Bergheim;13) Bonn;14) Kerpen;15) Sittard; 16)Wijk bij Duurstede;17) Zons.